Oracle Blog

Gestalt Blogology

Lego -> Social and "Fictional" Software

When I read Paul
Lamere's blog 27
Stages of Lego Sorting, it reminded
me of Douglas
Coupland's wonderfully
insightful book Microserfswhich
is about a group of developers (some of whom had major Lego phases, one
of whom goes on to create a Lego masterpiece ;) who form a kind of geek
commune around a company to develop a software application called
"Oop!". The idea of "Oop!" was to provide a rich kind of virtual Lego
set, with the ability to use, build and share smart mobile &
reactive components (a bit like Lego Mindstorms), which could act like
doors or lifts or game characters or Rubik's cubes or vehicles, and so
on. Ok, pretty interesting idea.

But that started me thinking; that's not the first time I've seen a
software application described in a novel. DouglasAdams
in Dirk
Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
also outlines a rather amazing piece of software which is best
described by Douglas (2) himself:

'Well, Gordon assigned me to write a
major piece of software for the Apple Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet,
accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy to use, lots of
graphics. I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just said,
"Everything. I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business
software for that machine." And being of a slightly whimsical turn of
mind I took him literally.

'You see, a pattern of numbers can
represent anything you like, can be used to map any surface, or
modulate any dynamic process -- and so on. And any set of company
accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers. So I sat down and
wrote a program that'll take those numbers and do what you like with
them. If you just want a bar graph it'll do them as a bar graph, if you
want them as a pie chart or scatter graph it'll do them as a pie chart
or scatter graph. If you want dancing girls jumping out of the piechart
in order to distract attention from the figures the pie chart actually
represents, then the program will do that as well. Or you can turn your
figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they
fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be
determined by the performance of each division of your company. Great
for producing animated corporate logos that actually mean something.
'But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company
accounts represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well.
Well, I thought it was silly. The corporate world went bananas over
it.'

Reg regarded him solemnly from over a
piece of carrot poised delicately on his fork in front of him, but did
not interrupt.

'You see, any aspect of a piece of
music can be expressed as a sequence or pattern of numbers,' enthused
Richard. 'Numbers can express the pitch of notes, the length of notes,
patterns of pitches and lengths.' 'You mean tunes,' said Reg. The
carrot had not moved yet. Richard grinned. 'Tunes would be a very good
word for it. I must remember that.'

(aside: I think Douglas Adams had several important insights into
software, one of which is quoted at the end of an interesting article Autistic Social Software (not
really about autism, but about the ADD of software products and/or
developers who don't want to try to understand the social implications
of networked communication and collaboration; if you're into groupware
though, my single favourite groupware article is one that I read 10
years ago - What do groups need?
A proposed set of generic groupware requirements - it
offers an excellent synthesis and framework for evaluating groupware
requirements; gosh, back then I used e-mail to request a copy from one
of the authors Munir Mandviwalla; he kindly sent me a hardcopy which I
still re-read occasionally - great stuff, and now you can get it on the
ACM portal; both of these articles only go to show that creating truly
new forms of groupware is very hard)

I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg though in terms of creative
software ideas in fiction; anyone know any others?